Remember our bird feeder? It was up and running last winter, although all the building work around here meant that neither we nor the birds had optimal peace of mind to really enjoy it. This winter we’re all enjoying it more than ever.

The seed mix – sunflower and peanut – that we optimized in our experiments two years ago remains a great hit with the local birds. This year we improved it further: Eric found hulled and chopped sunflower seeds, which means that we don’t get that mushy pile of sunflower hulls underneath the feeder.

The mix of birds that it brings has changed, though. The Great Tits and Blue Tits are there as usual. The Jays and Nuthatches still come, but they are fewer than they used to be, and same with the Sparrows. The Magpies mostly came in autumn and now haven’t been around much.

Instead we have some new guests.

• Siskins (Carduelis spinus, siisike, grönsiska) have absolutely dominated during the current cold snap. They move around in flocks of several dozens birds. When they come to feed, they come a few at a time, until there are around 15 of them on the ground beneath the feeder, another few at the feeder itself, and more in the trees and bushes nearby. They’re also easily spooked by bigger birds: when a blackbird or fieldfare flies by, even at some distance, the entire flock of Siskins takes flight in near-panic and flies into the trees. Since they are so many trying to take off at the same time, it isn’t rare for a few of them to hit our kitchen window. Luckily they haven’t gathered much speed yet when they reach the window and usually don’t even knock themselves out but fly straight on. While they sit around in the trees, they chirp and twitter constantly. You really can’t miss them when you walk past our yard. It does not surprise me at all that people like breeding them as songbirds.
• Blackbirds (Turdus merula, koltrast, musträstas). They were more frequent arlier during the season when it wasn’t that cold yet but they come now, too. Just like the previous years, there’s either a single couple, or they just travel in pairs: I’ve seen single females and single males, but rarely more. They have trouble hanging on to the feeder: neither small and nimble like the tits and sparrows, nor strong like the jays, they struggle and wobble. They’re much happier on the ground. To accommodate them, we now spread food on the ground underneath the feeder, too. (The Siskins like that as well.)
• Fieldfare (Turdus pilaris, björktrast, hallrästas). A big and bossy bird who likes to have the whole field for itself and chases away any others. It doesn’t hesitate to bully even the jays, who are their size if not larger. It likes to feed on the ground just like the Blackbird. It also likes to just sit there after feeding and look sullen, just because it can.

Among the rarer visitors, there is still the occasional Green Finch or Great Spotted Woodpecker. I also noted a pretty Redpoll (Carduelis flammea, urvalind, gråsiska) the other day.

More Siskins

Then I consulted the Internet. The Internet suggested a liquid trap for them, with a tasty liquid (vinegar, juice, wine, sugar water) and a few drops of dishwashing detergent.

For the sake of experiment, we made two traps: one with apple juice (which seemed reasonable since they like fruit) and one with red wine vinegar (which several online sources suggested as particularly effective). And it worked like a miracle. After a few hours the apple juice had trapped 4 or 5, while the vinegar trap had 17 dead fruit flies. Since then the number of dead flies keeps increasing and we hardly ever see any live ones flying around – they must go directly from hatching to drowning. Great trick!

Since we first ate its fruit we’ve wondered about what kind of apple it might be. Today we went to Rosendal’s trädgård to find out. This weekend they have their annual apple and pear show, which includes representatives from Sweden’s Pomological society who sit there and inspect people’s fruit and try to figure out what kind it may be.

We brought them five of our apples. They looked and they cut and they tasted and they consulted their books, and they concluded that our apple tree is a Gravensteiner. “Sweet, at first quite tart, very fine. Very old variety. Excellent both for eating and for cooking.”

We put up before-and-after photos of the house for the guests to look at. Going through the photos was interesting – already I myself am starting to forget what the house felt like before we started changing it. (I’ll be posting more of them here, too.)

Adrian was feeling quite a bit better today. He was sort of unwell on Friday, and really ill on Saturday, with a fever and a runny nose, and barely sleeping at night. Last night he slept a bit better, and today he actually had enough energy to crawl around and play and look at all the people. He loved the crowd so much that he barely slept at all during the afternoon.

The building works here may be done but that doesn’t mean we’ve run out of work. We have painting to do, lighting fixtures to buy (there’s currently no lighting in the entry hall, or the stair hall, or the walk-in closet), books and bookshelves to move from the bedroom to the office/library…

This evening, after both kids were asleep and our productive time began, we got started on laying stone on the flat bit of ground between the garden stairs and the stairs to the porch. It was already paved before, but when the new porch got built, the upper flight of stairs became wider and moved slightly, so we ended up with an unpaved gap.

We chose paver blocks that come in a mixture of sizes, Fantasi Antik. We spent an hour and a half this evening designing a layout for the stones that we can live with.

Both Eric and I are “pattern people”: if there is a visual pattern, accidental or intentional, we cannot help noticing it. And if that pattern is in a place where there isn’t supposed to be one, it will keep catching our eye and irritating us. Like a visual itch. It often happens with cheapish printed products – cheap laminate flooring, fabric, wallpaper – where the pattern repeat is too short.

So we wanted to make very sure our paving is sufficiently random. In particular, no too-long unbroken lines, and no too-large rectangles of blocks. For example the long unbroken line down the middle of that marketing photo above would be a clear no-no.

It was almost like a computer game. Except with pixels of 70x70mm, weighing over half a kilogram each. And instead of trying to make order, we tried to make randomness. Sort of an anti-Tetris.

Daily, I find dead flies and other small insects here and there in the house. In the beginning I found them mildly disgusting but now I’m so used to them that I don’t react much, just pick them up or sweep them into a wastepaper basket.

It feels like I take out at least one (live) wasp per day. So I guess they built a new nest somewhere after we interrupted their building works in Ingrid’s play house.

For a while we had moths who for some reason tended to congregate in the bathroom. Every evening I found several moths there, on the window, on the windowsill, on the wall, and almost daily one in the washbasin. (That last one got mercilessly flushed down the drain.) Now the moths are gone, I guess their season is over.

Once one of them went and died inside the bathroom fan. The fan made its wings vibrate so it sounded like there was a bee in the room. I kept looking for it and it took me several days to realize where the buzzing was coming from.

One unexpected consequence of the remodelling is a naming confusion. Rooms have changed names as they changed roles, and functions have moved around the house. (You can see the floor plans here.) With each change there was a transition period when we had to clarify each reference to a room, especially when talking to Ingrid. “It’s in the hall. No, not the old hall, in the new hall where the new front door is.”

Before the whole building project began we had a Bedroom, a Living Room, a Bathroom, a Kitchen, a Hall, a Corridor, and a Pantry. The upstairs effectively didn’t figure in our daily lives, but when we needed to refer to the rooms upstairs they were usually named the Library, the Room with Boxes and the Toilet.

To prepare for the builders, we had to evacuate some of the downstairs rooms and move into the upstairs ones. The Library became the Bedroom (with the bookshelves draped in cheap IKEA bedsheets, both to keep the dust away from the books and to keep the bedroom reasonably calm for sleeping). The Room with Boxes became Ingrid’s Room. The Bedroom became the Old Bedroom, and once the remodelling was finished and we had moved into that room, it became the Office.

We also had and have multiple halls. The entrance to the house was moved, so you now enter the house in one place but the stairs to the first floor are in a different part of the house. Thus the old Hall became the Stair Hall, and we acquired a new Entry Hall. While work was underway the Pantry (which is now the Laundry Room) was sometimes also called the Hall, since that was where our temporary entrance was.

As we discussed tearing down walls and moving rooms around, the Corridor widened and became a new room. The architect imagined that new room as the Dining Room, keeping the Living Room where it was. We on the other hand imagined the Dining Room to be the one closer to the Kitchen, and the new room as the Living Room. To minimize confusion I ended up referring to them as the Old Room and the New Room when speaking to the builders.

Those names now no longer feel appropriate but the rooms still don’t have new names, mostly because their roles are not yet apparent. (The Old Room is effectively unfurnished.) I suspect the names will become clear when we finish furnishing the rooms.

In the meantime, when precision is needed, the New Room is sometimes called the Sun Room because of its glass wall, while the Old Room is called the Forest because of its wallpaper.

A good thing about buying a house for the long term is that we can make odd choices. I intend to live here for the next 20 years or so at least, circumstances allowing. We don’t need to think about what the real estate market likes, what sells and what doesn’t. We can do our own thing.

Item one: colour on walls. White interiors are definitely the in thing. It’s almost a joke – any time a newspaper runs a story about someone’s home, the photos are all white. Any time a house is up for sale, the interior is white. (I wonder how many of them have painted the walls white just before the sale.)

We chose to go against that current. The two living rooms have colourful wallpaper: one in cream and red, one in green tones. The entry hall and the office have deep green walls. Now whenever I walk upstairs, where the walls all still have their original white colour, my spontaneous reaction is that the space feels raws and unfinished.

The bathroom has a spacious shower corner but no bathtub. The old bathroom had ample space, but we moved the bathroom to a new location to make space for other changes, and the new room is much smaller, perhaps about half the old one. We traded a bathtub for more living space.

For us this was no real loss. We never take baths; I think I may have taken a single bath since we moved here three years ago, and Eric may have taken a couple of baths as well. Ingrid likes to soak and play in a tub occasionally but we have a small portable tub for her.

Less controversially, we chose untreated pine floors. No hardwoods, no oak parquet, no varnish and no oil. We will be treating the floors with linseed oil soap.

Butter on the other hand is now tried and tested and works well. I love butter. Just plain good bread with butter on is delicious.

Today the builders finished their work, packed up their stuff and went home. Just in time for the weekend, and just in time for my vacation! (Today was my last day at work, I’m on vacation for the next four weeks.)

The very last thing they did was sand the floor in the old hall. When they started work in there, back in January, they tore up the laminate flooring, and the glued cork tiles beneath them, and uncovered the original pine planks at the bottom. The cork layer had been glued right on top of the pine and left ugly patches everywhere. For half a year the floor looked atrocious. But now after sanding it is pristine again, and looks lovely.

We now have pine plank floors in all three rooms on the ground floor, as well as that hall. In the old living room the floor is varnished; in the other rooms the new floors are untreated as yet. We have ambitious plans to leave them that way and simply care for them by scrubbing them with linseed oil soap, which both cleans and protects the floor, a bit like oiling it.

You can see this kind of floor in some old Swedish houses, and after a hundred years it both looks and feels wonderful – silvery gray and satiny smooth. This is especially nice if you walk around barefoot at home, like us. I’ve been told that it doesn’t take a hundred years to get there. Should the floors not turn out nice, we can always change our minds later and treat them with oil.

Today I gave the newly-sanded floor its first scrubbing. Now the hall smells of linseed oil soap. To me it smells like a very old but well-cared house, like an old rural schoolhouse that’s been turned into a museum, or an old Estonian farmhouse. A very cosy smell.

If you can read Swedish, you can learn about using soap for floor care from Skansen.

For several months we could live pretty comfortably despite the works. The builders were in their half of the house, we in ours. Now that they’re painting the living room and kitchen, we’re all in each others’ way again. So instead of life gradually getting closer and closer to normal, we finish it all off with a good dose of chaos.

The microwave oven stands on the floor in the storage closet – with three rooms between it and the kitchen. There is a fruit bowl in the CD shelf. The coffee maker is in the laundry room. The “kitchen cupboard” of plastic IKEA bins is in the hallway, behind the laundry drying rack. I use a step stool as a side table. The bath towels are in the living room.

Our wooden deck is pretty much finished now and we’ve had dinner outside for three days in a row. Absolutely lovely. But if we are to eat breakfast here, too, we will definitely need some kind of umbrella thing – I had my breakfast out here this morning at 7.30 and it was already almost too hot.

Our kitchen garden is now producing strawberries at a good pace. I think I picked about 20 large strawberries to share between the three of us after dinner. Today we got the first ripe berries from the later varieties, so we could try all four varieties side by side. Both Eric and I liked Polka best – it has the richest, deepest flavour. Honeoye and Senga Sengana have a fresher, lighter flavour, and to me those two taste pretty similar. Rebecca is a variety that looks like a garden strawberry but tastes like a wild one. More weird than good.

Dastardly roe deer bit off two of my tomato plants, leaving little more than a stump. The third one they didn’t touch. Now the two mangled ones look like they might survive and grow some new branches, so we’re doing our best to protect them. Yesterday we bought nylon netting that I hung over the planting beds. The ones housing strawberries had netting already since last year; now all the veggies are protected, too. (In addition to those unfortunate tomato bushes I have planted some butternut squash as well as peas.)

I hope the deer don’t eat gooseberries. If they do, we will have to put up something more extensive and less discreet, an enclosure of some sort around the entire kitchen garden.

I realize now that I have no current photos of the kitchen garden. It is almost, but not quite, light enough outside that I could take some now, at 10pm. Three weeks to go until midsummer.

Ingrid loves picking flowers. There is no end to the amount of flowers she’d pick if given the chance. I ask her to pause when we run out of vases in suitable sizes.

We limit the picking to flowers in our own garden (with bulbs like daffodils and crocuses off-limits) and in no-mans-lands: outside fences, on roadside greens etc. And we try to leave flowers that are large and beautiful but few, such as if there’s a small stand of poppies just outside someone’s fence.

Other than that, she’s got free hands, and I don’t guide her. She picks anything that flowers. Scillas, hyacinths, wood anemones, daisies, cowslips, dandelions, forget-me-nots, pennycress, buttercups… cow parsley or something like it (hundkäx/harakputk), deadnettle (vitplister/piimanõges), greater celandine (skelört/vereurmarohi), etc etc etc. I think we had about a dozen species on our kitchen table as of today.

It turns out that cowslips, grape hyacinths, daisies and deadnettles keep very well in a vase, for many days. Both cowslips and daisies can even recover after wilting when running out of water if the water is then replenished. Scillas don’t live long in a vase; anemone flowers survive for several days but their leaves wilt quickly; buttercups spread lots of annoying yellow particles around them.

We tried cycling with Adrian again and it went swimmingly. Having Ingrid by his side as company and as chief dummy-popper-inner is a great help. We didn’t dare undertake a long trip, in case he totally hated it, so we just cycled to a nearby garden centre and bought some fertilizer and a few perennials (Astrantia “Moulin Rouge” and Coreopsis verticillata “Grandiflora”) and some seeds. I managed to plant the perennials but the seeds are still waiting. I also got rid of some more dandelions, this time at the back of the house.

Afternoon: dug out dandelions from our lawn. I don’t aspire to a weed-free lawn, indeed I don’t aspire to any kind of a lawn, but I don’t want the dandelions to spread out of control. I got rid of a few dozen today, I think – rather satisfying. Meanwhile Ingrid made me a “soup” with dandelions and daisies, birch catkins and lilac flowers.

Evening: neither of the kids was tired after dinner so we headed to the playground. Or rather, Eric and Ingrid headed to the playground, and I thought I’d let Adrian wind down for bedtime. He was immediately upset about their departure – started crying as soon as they left, became happy again when we went into the hall, and dived from my arms towards the stroller. So we followed them (although with a hip seat instead of the stroller) and watched Ingrid enjoy herself on the swing and the slide and the merry-go-round. Then we fed dandelion leaves to the sheep who live at Spanga gymnasium next to the playground.